The Romanian-born Joseph M. Juran – with W.
Edwards Deming – was instigator of the Japanese discovery of quality after the end of World War Two. Born in 1904, Juran is an American electrical engineer who worked for Western Electric in the 1920s and then AT&T. In 1953 he arrived in Tokyo, by which time Deming was already making waves with his quality philosophy. At the invitation of the Japanese Federation of Economic Associations and the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers, Juran was asked to spend two months analyzing Japanese approaches to quality.
From his experience, Juran believed Japan’s success was built on quality products. This message was ignored as Western businesses continued with their, by then mistaken, belief that Japan was succeeding through lower prices and nothing else. In the 1960s Juran could be found attempting to awaken US executives to the emergence of Japan.
With the ‘discovery’ of quality in the 1980s, Juran and his work through the Juran Institute came to greater prominence – while remaining slightly in the shadow of Deming. Juran’s weighty Quality Control Handbook was published in 1951. Juran was awarded the Second Class Order of the Sacred Treasure by the Emperor of Japan – the highest honor for a non-Japanese citizen – for ‘the development of quality control in Japan and the facilitation of US and Japanese friendship’.
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alking to Japanese audiences in the 1950s, Joseph Juran’s message was enthusiastically absorbed by groups of senior managers. In the West, his audiences were made up of engineers and quality inspectors.
Therein, argues Juran, lies the problem. While the Japanese have made quality a priority at the top of the organization, in the West it is delegated downwards, an operational rather than a managerial issue.
In the post-war years, Juran believes US businesses were caught unawares because of two reasons: they assumed their Asian adversaries were copycats rather than innovators, and their chief executives were too obsessed with financial indicators to notice any danger signs.
Juran’s quality philosophy, laid out in Planning for Quality and his other books, is built around a quality trilogy: quality planning, quality management and quality implementation.
While Juran is critical of Deming as being overly reliant on statistics, his own approach is based on the forbiddingly entitled Company-Wide Quality Management (CWQM) which aims to create a means of disseminating quality to all.
Juran insists that quality cannot be delegated and wa an early exponent of what has come to be known as empowerment: for him quality has to be the goal of each employee, individually and in teams, through self-supervision.
His approach is less mechanistic than Deming and places greater stress on human relations (though Deming adherents disagree with this interpretation).
Juran places quality in a historical perspective.
Manufacturing products to design specifications and then inspecting them for defects to protect the buyer, he points out, was something the Egyptians had mastered 5,000 years previously when building the pyramids. Similarly, the ancient Chinese had set up a separate department of the central government to establish quality standards and maintain them.
Juran’s message – encapsulated in Planning for Quality – is that
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quality is nothing new. This is a simple, but daunting message.
If quality is so elemental and elementary why had it become ignored in the West? Juran’s unwillingness to gild his straightforward message is attractive to some, but has made the communication of his ideas less successful than he would have liked.
Where Juran is innovative is in his belief that there is more to quality than specification and rigorous testing for defects.
The human side of quality is regarded as critical. The origins of Juran’s thoughts can be traced to his time at Western Electric. Juran analyzed the large number of tiny circuit breakers routinely scrapped by the company. Instead of waiting at the end of a production line to count the defective products, Juran looked at the manufacturing process as a whole. He came up with a solution and offered it to his bosses.
‘They were not impressed and told Juran that this was not his job: ‘We’re the inspection department and our job is to look at these things after they are made and find the bad ones.
Making them right in the first place is the job of the production department.’
In response, Juran developed his all-embracing theories of what quality should entail. ‘In broad terms, quality planning consists of developing the products and processes required to meet the customers’ needs. More specifically, quality planning comprises the following basic activities:
• identify the customers and their needs
• develop a product that responds to those needs
• develop a process able to produce that product.’
Quality planning, says Juran, can be produced through ‘a road map . . . an invariable sequence of steps’. These are:
• identify who are the customers
• determine the needs of those customers
• translate those needs into our language
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• develop a product that can respond to those needs
• optimize the product features so as to meet our needs as well as customers’ needs
• develop a process which is able to produce the product
• optimize the process
• prove that the process can produce the product under operating conditions
• transfer the process to the operating forces.
As with so many other recipes for quality, Juran’s is more far reaching and difficult to achieve than a list of bullet points can ever suggest.